Working paper library

Beyond Hedonic Models: Spatiotemporal, Hierarchical and Probabilistic Architectures for Residential Real Estate Price Forecasting

A pseudo-real-time evaluation on 632,000 Quebec transactions and 82 local market indices, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper asks whether new forecasting architectures improve residential price forecasts over strong conventional methods, and under which conditions. Using the audited Quebec land-registry sample of UQO Working Paper 22 (632,006 sales, 2021–2026) and its real-time quality-adjusted index vintages, it defines three…

Forecasting Realized Volatility Across Asset Classes: HAR, GARCH, and Machine Learning in a Unified Multi-Asset Horse Race, 2013–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v0.2

The paper compares 27 forecasts of daily realized variance (six HAR specifications, GARCH, GJR, EGARCH and Realized GARCH, penalized regressions, random forests, XGBoost and LightGBM on two information sets, an LSTM, a Transformer, a LightGBM pooled across assets, and two combinations) on 25 liquid instruments from…

Half a Million Prices, Twenty Models

A Systematic Assessment of Hedonic Specifications and Estimation Methods for the Quebec Housing Market, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

Fifty years after Rosen (1974), applied hedonic practice still rests on specification choices (functional form, temporal controls, spatial controls, estimation method) that are made by convention and rarely stress-tested jointly. Using 514,212 Quebec residential sales (2021–2026) whose structural descriptors come from…

Hedonic Pricing of Short-Term Rental Properties: A Multi-Method Analysis of Airbnb Listing Prices in Quebec

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper estimates hedonic price functions for a province-wide cross-section of Airbnb listings in Quebec, Canada, from a scrape of 5,000 listing cards collected in early 2026 (3,456 with a displayed price). The displayed price field is bimodal: about 28% of priced listings, mostly small Montreal rental units, show…